In today's environment, many consumers are minimizing or even eliminating the use of cash or checks for transactions. Instead, some consumers are choosing to utilize credit or debits cards to pay for purchases. Credit and debits cards are widely accepted as payment for transactions by retailers, financial institutions, and Internet retailers, among others. As a result of using credit and debit cards, consumers are accumulating paper receipts for these transactions.
Accounting for the accuracy of transactions made with credit and/or debit cards becomes unwieldy when more than a few items are purchased or cash is obtained using a credit and/or debit card. A process for reconciling a receipt is to await a statement that is mailed to the consumer from the financial institution, and manually compare the statement to the receipt on a record of the receipt. This process must be completed for each credit and debit card used by the consumer. Further, transactions that were not listed on the current statement must be held and reconciled the following month. Another process for reconciling the receipts is to download an electronic statement from the financial institution. Again, the paper receipts are often manually compared to the electronic statement. Yet another reconciliation process involves entering information from the paper receipts into a financial software package, for instance Quicken™ or Microsoft Money™. The entered information is compared to a paper or electronic statement from the financial institution to reconcile transactions. Each of these processes involves a manual review of the paper or electronic receipts.
Reconciling credit and/or debit cards transactions is helpful because the dollar amounts billed by the financial institution may be different than amounts shown on the consumers paper receipt. For instance, when a seller utilizes a carbonless receipt, the seller, or an employee of the seller, may unscrupulously alter the amount approved by the purchaser. For example, the unscrupulous seller may add a tip amount to the portion of the carbonless receipt submitted to the financial institution for payment that is different from the amount shown on the purchaser's receipt. Discrepancies such as these may not be readily apparent unless the purchaser compares and reconciles each paper receipt with a statement from the financial institution that discloses the amount actually paid to the seller. Manual comparisons can be very time consuming and prone to errors.
Thus, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists for a solution that addresses the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.